


the best thing i'll ever do (is holding close to you)

by hitlikehammers



Series: wait for me [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (with Eventual Happy Ending), And He's Reached His Limit of Heartbreak in One Lifetime Damnit, Angst, Codependency, Cryogenics, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Sex, Longing, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers is Only a Man, Supersoldiers in Love, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 00:32:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7459653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every man has his breaking point. And much as they tried; much as people tended to forget—Steve Rogers is no more than that: a man.</p><p>And no man can be expected to last long with his whole heart stopped on ice.</p><p> </p><p>Or: in which Steve reaches the end of his line after trying to live with the consequences of Bucky going back on ice. Because Steve Rogers is only a mortal man. And mortal men have limits as to how much heartbreak they can stand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the best thing i'll ever do (is holding close to you)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first of four installments in a series. They're all written. They'll be posted fairly quickly. It's just that it didn't work as a chaptered fic, so series it became.
> 
> Title credit [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJr8cw0bRh8). 
> 
> Love to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad/), as always <3

Here’s the thing.

Steve knows pain, knows struggle, knows suffering.

Steve has fought his own lungs for breath, and come up wanting; choked on his own bile and the water he’s made of where it settled lethal in places all wrong. Steve has been burned, and flayed; irradiated, killed down to the cells, rejected to the bottom and built up new from the bones. Steve has been crushed and skewered and shot and stabbed and left for dead. Steve has felt his blood freeze. Steve has felt his heart stop in his chest.

And yet: Steve has never experience pain before, like _this_.

__________________________

They had a night. Just one, before.

Well. Before.

“Let me,” Bucky had breathed first thing, reaching for Steve’s shirt, and the windows were open, and the air was warm, thick—a cover for them where they no longer had anything to hide.

The horrible irony skipped in Steve’s pulse like a broken record, like the ridges run too low.

“Everything worth anything in me is yours,” Bucky murmured against Steve’s skin, just a whisper as he slipped the fabric from Steve’s shoulders and bared his chest, running the rough flat of his tongue across muscle, atop each nipple, drawing circles and spirals and idle dreams where Steve’s heart beat in the middle. “And it only survived at all because you had it,” and Bucky pressed his lips hard enough through Steve’s skin to reach his ribs, to suss their shape, to remind them both of a time gone by. “It only came back because you gave it to me, so freely.”

He lifted up on his knees, straddling Steve as he gazed down at him through that curtain of dark hair, his single flesh hand cupped to the curve of Steve’s cheek as he sighed:

“So _perfect_ , Stevie,” he said like a confessional, like the last promise he’d make at the gates of Heaven or Hell.

“Everything I am is yours,” Steve couldn’t stop the words in response; had no desire to, even for the way that Bucky’s face fell, all the weight that’d stood suspended back again, lining his expression in sharp relief.

“No,” Bucky’d said, hard and choked. “No, it’s not, don’t you go telling yourself that lie.” And he’d looked up, and Steve’s heart had broken from quarters into splinters at the tears on Bucky’s face.

“Don’t go down with me, Steve. Please.”

“Then don’t go down _without_ me,” Steve rasped back, his own cheeks wet.

“It’s not forever,” Bucky leaned in, and rested his head on Steve’s chest, wrapped his arm behind Steve’s back, rested at the hollow of his spine. “I’d never leave forever, not again.”

“Don’t leave at _all_ ,” Steve moaned, tearing at the seams, Bucky’s ear to the heart that’s thrashing in revolt against the unimaginable, come back to haunt them.

“Steve,” Bucky looked broken, and Steve took a moment to reflect—for the space of a twitch in a racing heart—to think that Bucky’d looked that way too often, and almost always because of _Steve_. “Baby, I gotta,” he started before shaking his head, changing tactics.

“If it was you, if someone else could come and take control—”

“It _was_ me,” Steve protested, maybe futile but no less of his heart to it. “Not my mind, Buck, but my body,” so many times, too, more than it didn’t, more than Steve could manage half the time, but for _Bucky_ —

“And you saw me through. You saved me from myself,” Steve said, begged with his eyes for understanding, acceptance, _anything_ ; “Every time.”

The lines at the corners of Bucky’s eyes had deepened at that, and Steve’s chest had stung as he whispered:

“Let me save you.” He reached a hand to smooth Bucky’s hair. “ _Please_.”

Bucky shook his head.

“I can’t ask that of you,”

“Why the hell _not_?” And Steve’s voice had reached its breaking point. Steve’s heart was ready to damn well give out.

“Steve,” and Bucky’d reached, he’d traced a thumb down Steve’s lips. “Steve, everything you are, isn’t me,” his smile turned sad. “You’re so much more, you’re so _much_ ,” and it was there Bucky’s own voice cracked in kind.

“You’re the sun,” he’d rasped, watching Steve with bright eyes. “I’m a moon when I’m lucky. When I get to reflect you just a little, if only by halves at best.”

“That’s bullshit,” Steve had hissed, hateful with it; fearful with it. “Do you not trust me, is that it?” His stomach had plummeted, but he steeled himself, because it made sense.

“I get it, I do,” he conceded sadly. “I’ve never been able to save you before—”

“Shut up,” Bucky cut him off. “Shut the _fuck_ up, Steve,” and he made the point, forced it by kissing him hard, almost painful. “I trust you with _everything_.”

“Then _why_ —”

“If I want you,” Bucky told him, all heart and soul in his eyes, in the words: “If I want _this_ , I have to be worthy of you. Of all of you, of everything you are that I can never be, I at least have to be worthy enough to lie in the presence of all those things, Steve.” Bucky blinked, eyes shimmering. “At least have to be clean as I can get, _right_ as I can be, to be...”

Steve could only shake his head.

“You’re a better man than I’ve ever been, James Barnes,” he growled, almost. Near a whine. Near a sob. “You’re the thing _I’ve_ always been hoping I could be worthy of, just to have you,” Steve screwed his eyes closed and whispered: “Just to listen to your breath as I go to sleep.”

“Look at me.”

Steve opened his eyes and let tears held back fall free to answer Bucky’s demand. Always.

“It’s insane, I know,” Bucky murmured, pressing his cheek to Steve and holding so damned close. “It’s not healthy, or right, or whatever anyone would say is okay,” he gasped against Steve’s ear. “But I’m only breathing here, only _trying_ , here, in the face of all the things in my head, all the shit that I’ve done, because of the promise of _you_ , Steve.” He pulled back just a little, just enough to look Steve in the eye, to watch through tears while Steve’s own streamed:

“You’re my light. My hope. And I have to know that there will never be another moment where I look at you and can’t see the world,” Bucky’s voice caught, tore.

“There can’t even be another moment where I look at you, and don’t know my own heart. Okay?” He stroked Steve’s jawline, over and again. “Do you understand why I need that?”

And Steve did, but couldn’t admit it. Couldn’t breathe.

“I’ve done worse than die, Steve. I’ve known worse,” Bucky pushed on. “But there’s nothing worse than losing you.”

Steve got that, he understood that, but, but.

 _God_.

“How,” he choked; “how could you _ever_ think it was any different, though? For _me_?”

And when Steve started sobbing in earnest. Bucky gathered him in, gathered him close.

“This is not goodbye,” Bucky hissed against Steve’s neck. “You listen to me. This is _not_ goodbye.”

He pulled back and peppered Steve with desperate kisses for a string of breaths before gasping:

“I’m so selfish, Steve. I’m so selfish,” Bucky laughed, wet and ragged. “I could _never_ leave you forever.”

And Steve: he just kept shaking, all the dams breaking, all the walls crumbling down.

“But while I’m away,” Bucky murmured into Steve’s skin; “I need you to live, I need you to—”

“Don’t,” Steve snapped, bit out hard as his heart twisted and he pulled away, recoiled without a thought as much as moving away, as putting any distance, any space between them killed him in itself; “Don’t ask me to do that, James Barnes. Don’t you fucking _dare_.”

And Bucky’s eyes had grown so sad, so self-loathing that Steve felt his own soul shrivel for it, and so when Bucky beckoned, Steve was helpless.

“Come here.”

Open arms were offered to him, and he took them. He pressed his chest to Bucky’s chest and clung like the world was ending, because it might have been. It could have been.

It was. And Steve couldn’t stop it.

“I love you,” Bucky whispered into Steve’s hair as he held him, pressed him close just as hard. “I will never stop loving you.”

And he pulled back, but only just enough to look Steve in the eye, to speak before he claimed his lips, fierce and overfull:

“This is _not goodbye_.”

__________________________

And it wasn’t. No, it wasn’t.

And they’d loved that night like they’d never loved before. They’d pressed against each other so not even air or light or God could pretend to separate them—they’d distilled a lifetime into that night, all the things they’d never done, never dared, never had the freedom to relish: but it’d tasted bitter. The only. The last.

It wasn’t _goodbye_. And yet.

Steve thinks, now, that this was inevitable. 

But Steve hadn’t been lying when he’d said that it was him, before. That it was him who brought danger and hardship to them both, and Bucky’d stood by his side and waited through the worst and then some. Beacon in the dark. Calm eye of every storm.

And Steve hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he’d failed Bucky. Over and again, he’d failed. But he can’t keep failing, is the thing.

He _cannot_ keep failing his own goddamn heart.

And above anything else: it hurts. And Steve’s spent his whole life hurting. Physically, emotionally. Deep in his soul.

He’s tired, now. He’s tired, and maybe the serum wasn’t as good as it needed to be; maybe _he_ wasn’t as good as he’d needed to be, because it could fix the hurting, it couldn’t make him strong enough to stand it always, to heft it this heavy, this sharp.

Every man had a breaking point, they’d always said. Maybe his is just overdue.

He’s still a man, after all. He thinks they fancied him a little bit of a god, some Hercules breathed life from the pages of myth, and he’d been fool enough to let them think it, too. Let them all believe.

But he’s only a man. And he _cannot_ keep failing.

He cannot keep _hurting_ like _this_ , and stay standing anymore.

He makes sure his friends are safe. Will stay safe. Won’t suffer for his actions, for helping him. He makes arrangements. Settles affairs.

It’s fitting, he thinks, that he gets in a plane, pilots it true: it’s fitting that finally, when he puts it down, it’ll take him where he’s always needed to be. Always wanted to be.

“Captain,” T’Challa greets him, stone-faced on the tarmac. “We did not expect you.”

Steve looks him dead in the eyes, considers him carefully. “Didn’t you?”

T’Challa doesn’t miss a beat; tilts his head in concession.

“We did not expect you so soon.”

Steve shrugs. “I can’t leave him here.”

T’Challa nods. “He was clear that we not wake him until the technology is complete. We will not betray his wishes in this.”

Steve shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want you to.” Bucky’s had enough of people going against his will. More than enough. 

T’Challa simply turns, and expects Steve to follow his lead not toward the royal estates, but toward the labs Steve knows well enough, by now.

They understand each other, then. There is one technology that _is_ complete. There is one answer to the problem before them.

Neither of them are stupid.

And this time, the plane lands, and Steve faces the prospect of ice like a friend, faces the promise of cryo-sleep like a blessing because it’s a sleep beside his other half where he belongs, because it’s a stilling of his heart for all the hurt it sends through him with every quivering half-beat: because finally, _finally_.

Steve is going _home_.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
